Heroes and villains
Benno Muller-Hill
Benno Muller-Hill is a Professor in the Department of Genetics, University of Cologne, Weyertall21, D-5000 Cologne-41, FRG.
Der Genetiker: Das Leben des Nikolai Timofejew-Ressowski, genannt Ur*. By Daniil Granin. Translated from the Russian by Erich Ahrndt. Pahl-Rugenstein, Gottesweg 54, D-5000 Cologne 51: 1988. Pp. 377. Pbk DM36.
Since 1987, three editions of Daniil Granin's volume have been published in the Soviet Union. This German translation has just appeared and an English translation is underway. In the Soviet Union, public opinion is divided over the book. The conservative stalinists are horrified that a 'non-person' is honoured;some avant-gardists find the praise from Granin's mouth insufficient; and the public just loves it. The hero of this biography is a geneticist (Granin calls him the geneticist). What is all the fuss about?
Born in 1900, Nicolai Timofeeff-Ressovsky (orTimofejew-Ressowski) was just 18 years old when the revolution and the civil war began in the Soviet Union. He amused and charmed the anarchists who took him prisoner by telling them that Kropotkin used to come to drink tea with his father and that he, the boy, used to argue with him. In short, he survived and began to study biology. During these turbulent years much depended, perhaps even more than now, upon whom one studied with. Timofeeff-Ressovsky made the best possible choice: he went to work with Kolzov, a thoroughly well-educated zoologist who later speculated about genes being self-replicating molecules.
When Lenin died in 1924, the famous German neuroanatomist Vogt went to Moscow to procure slices from the great man's brain. There he arranged for German-Soviet scientific cooperation, and invited Soviet geneticists to come to Berlin to work in his institute. Kolzov was asked; but rather than go himself he sent Timofeeff-Ressovsky, who arrived in Berlin in 1925.
The young man had no degree and few papers to his credit, but he was very sharp. He set up a Drosophila laboratory to study population genetics. H.J. Muller, the American geneticist and later a Nobel prize-winner, came as a guest to the institute in late 1932 but had to leave a few months later when the Nazis came to power. Yet when Muller fled to the Soviet Union, Timofeeff-Ressovsky stayed in Germany. He stayed even when he was invited to work in the United States, fur example at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and had the common sense not to go back to the Soviet Union when he heard that his former colleagues were in deep trouble. The 1930s were his best time in science. Together with Delbriick and Zimmer, in 1935 he published the famous 'Drei-Manner-Arbeit' ('Three-Man-Paper') in which the gene became for the first time an object of interest to physicists. Schrodinger later picked up the idea, and based his famous book What is Life? upon it. But because Granin has no appreciation of science, we find little information about Timofeeff- Ressovsky's actual research, besides the superlatives indicating that here was a genius at work.
The book, however, is not about science and the scientist. Rather, it is a human or social problem that Granin tries untiringly to explain: how did the geneticist remain sub-director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute until the end of the war, although he carried a Soviet passport? His answer is long-winded but simple: Timofeeff-Ressovsky was the greatest of them all, of such standing that the Nazis did not dare to touch him. His nickname in the institute 'Ur' (the bison) supposedly indicated the precious, now almost extinct class of humans he belonged to. According to Granin, he lived in his own world, so to speak, outside Nazi Germany — at least until the war against the Soviet Union. Granin says that Timofeeff-Ressovsky became aware of the persecution of the Jews in Germany only after the war began.
Life became more difficult in June 1941, when Germany launched her attack on the Soviet Union. Timofeeff-Ressovskybegan to shelter displaced European scientists, helping many endangered people by giving them safe jobs in his institute. Behind his back, his eldest son, an 18-year-old physics student, became involved in really hazardous affairs. The son worked with a group of young people who helped foreign slave workers to escape and to hide. The police got wind of the organization. The young Timofeeff-Ressovsky was arrested, jailed and then transferred to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, where he perished before the Red Army arrived. During this time his father almost broke down. He hoped until the last moment that his son would survive—to help, he stayed in Berlin even after war ended.
Despite the chaos of the first year after the war, one Soviet official was well aware that Timofeeff-Ressovsky was a formidable expert on radiation damage and wanted to get him involved in the Soviet atomic bomb project. But another official believed that he deserved to die in a work camp and arranged for him to be shipped there. It took almost a year for the benevolent official to find Timofeeff-Ressovsky, and when he was finally spotted he was on the point of death. (Solzhcnitsyn has described this period, but Granin does not mention that.) After his health was restored, Timofeeff-Ressovsky was transferred to a secret laboratory. There he found his old collaborators from Germany — Zimmer, Born and others — and the work went on.
He now had to do secret research. Granin is again virtually silent about the details but apparently nothing was published during these years. Finally when the problems were solved and his German collaborators were allowed to return home to Germany, Timofeeff-Ressovsky became director of a small biological station in the Ural mountains. Although Lysenko was still in power, during the summer months he attracted students from Moscow to the laboratory, and later these people became the first Soviet molecular biologists. Timofeeff-Ressovsky was invited by the physicists to give talks on DNA in Moscow, but his enemies never gave in: he did not become a member of the Academy of Sciences and so never became part of the power elite in Soviet science.
The Soviet predilection for dividing people into heroes and villains, or saints and traitors, is fully evident in Granin's book. Forty years ago Lysenko and his colleagues were the heroes; now their enemies become the heroes. The charlatan Lysenko had been against eugenics. His former enemy, the geneticist Dubinin, was against eugenics too. But Timofeeff-Ressovsky was for it. So now when Dubinin had turned into a cantankerous old antisemite, docs this not indicate that eugenics was and is unquestionably a good thing? But was not 'racial hygiene' another term for eugenics in Germany under the Nazis? What research did Timofeeff-Ressovsky do in this respect? Granin has nothing to say on this question. He confirms only what no one has ever doubted, that Timofeeff-Ressovsky did not do human experiments on behalf of Goebbels. Goebbels certainly had other things to worry about.
So (his research on Drosophila apart) what work did Timofeeff-Ressovsky publish during his years in Nazi Germany? I spent a day in the library and found the following after browsing through Natur-wissenschaften (which regularly published the yearly record of all Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes). In 1935 he published an article on the mutational load in Drosophila, in which he commented that such a type of analysis would help greatly the "control" of human populations in race hygiene (Der Erbarzt No. 8, 117-118; 1935). In October 1938 he participated in a symposium on science and Weltanschauung organized by the race headquarters of the party. He invited the participants to his institute. But while he talked about mutation research, the party experts Ruttke, Gross and Wetzel talked more about Weltanschauung, minister Rosen-berg making the concluding remarks. So although Timofeeff-Ressovsky posed as if he was laying the foundations for the race measures of Nazi Germany, in reality he did nothing. However, the public who saw his picture among all the brown shirts in the official report of the meeting (Neues Volk 26-30; 1939) perhaps got a different impression — in hell even a super-scientist has to pay his respect to the devils.
During the war Timofeeff-Ressovsky found an even better rationale for his research: Heisenberg's atom machine. He was certainly the best-qualified radiation expert in Germany at the time and so he extended his research in this direction. His collaborators, Gerlach, Born and Zimmer, looked at the turnover of thorium X (radium 222, an alpha emitter with a half-life of two days) in human beings (Arch. f. exp. Pathologie 199, 83-88; 1942). The authors of the paper do not mention who were the individuals into which they injected the thorium X, nor do they say how large the dose was. I take here their word that it was harmless. Timofeeff-Ressovsky also did not himself publish a single anthropological paper; again he left this to his collaborators. For example Zarapkin published a rebuttal of Boas's old and "disturbing" finding that the head form of Jews changed with the environment (Z. Rassenkunde 13, 113-134; 1943).
If Granin had wanted to write a true biography of Timofeeff-Ressovsky he could have easily unearthed these details, which do not diminish anything of his subject's achievements as a scientist but which show that he was not super-human. So his book is neither a serious biography, nor a piece of art. It is just good journalism, half-truth presented convincingly. Timofeeff-Ressovsky did not deserve to die in a Soviet slave-labour camp with millions of others; it is not only saints that should have human rights. He and those other millions should he rehabilitated. Whether a serious biography of this intriguing man would be read with equal interest by the general public I doubt. But it would be well worth the effort for someone to try and write it.* The Geneticists: The Life of Nicolai Timofeeff-Ressovsky, Nicknamed the Bison.